


a proper place for everything

by NinthFeather



Category: The Sign of Abyss | ヨルの鍵
Genre: Character Study, Cleaning, Cohabitation, Discussion of Past Mistreatment/Abuse, Do Not Upload to Other Sites, Domestic, Gen, Gen Work, KonMari | Marie Kondo's Tidying Method, Light Angst, Responsibility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-16 09:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18689071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NinthFeather/pseuds/NinthFeather
Summary: Jold likes to keep his house clean--he has his reasons. Meme's room is getting more cluttered by the day--but she has reasons, too.Eventually, they talk it over.





	a proper place for everything

**Author's Note:**

> I’m pretty sure this is the first fic in this category? Someone else write something please...
> 
> This is set after Ch. 5 of the manga but there’s light spoilers for bits of Jold’s backstory that come up in later flashbacks. You can read shipping into this if you’ve gotta but I wrote it as gen.
> 
> No particular warnings, except vague allusions to the character's respective childhood traumas.

Jold was in the middle of breakfast when he heard the knock on the door.

He rubbed his eyes as he walked across the room, then opened the door to see Mikaray standing on the porch, with a book in his hand.

“For you and Meme,” Mikaray said.

Jold glanced at the cover. The title, “ _The life-changing magic of tidying up,”_  was written across the front in delicate gold script, accompanied by a pair of embossed clouds and a rising sun.

“Is this meant to help with restoring Niney?” Jold asked cautiously.

“No,” Mikaray replied, amused. “But it might help with Meme’s room.”  

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Meme picked at her breakfast as Jold explained. “The author is pretty famous in some parts of the kingdom! Even though she uses the word ‘magic’ in the title, you don’t need a particular Key or essence to do any of the things in the book! I think it might really help you.”

Meme groaned. “You aren’t going to let this go, are you?”

“It’s for your own good!” Jold insisted. “You can’t really be happy living like that.”

“I’ll read the book,” Meme said. “Go do your research.”

Jold started on the day’s research, digging in to the latest obscure text with a renewed sense of enthusiasm at the thought that Meme might finally clean up her room a little bit. Restoring Niney may have been his goal in life, but in the short term it was a thankless task-- not that he particularly deserved thanks for attempting to fix his own mistakes.  Regardless, by the time that a feeling of hunger interrupted his research and alerted him to the fact that it was probably sometime around midday, he hadn’t really made much progress in his work, but he was still feeling oddly hopeful.

He glanced up from his book to see Meme still seated at the kitchen table, though she’d traded the book on tidying up for one of the books of plant photography she’d bought in town last week.

“Already finished with the book?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You know I have the Key of Memory; did you really expect me to need a long time to read it?”

“No, I guess not,” he replied. “What did you think?”

“She had some decent ideas,” Meme said.

Jold waited.

Meme didn’t elaborate.

“Did you want to try any?” Jold asked.

“Not really,” she replied.

“What do you have against cleaning?” he demanded, standing. Both of them winced at the sound of his chair’s legs screeching against the hardwood floor.

Meme met his eyes, not standing, not moving an inch. “Why should I have to?” she asked. “I’m free now, right?”

_Oh._

He didn’t really know that much about what things had been like for Meme when she belonged to the military—he was nervous about asking, and she didn’t seem particularly eager to offer. But he’d spent five years as a researcher, and he could form hypotheses based on limited evidence.

Meme didn’t have a lot of basic skills, because no one ever expected her to need them. A person who would never live outside of military supervision didn’t need to know things like how to budget, or why it was important not to leave food lying around, or how to do laundry. Maybe they’d even avoided teaching her those things so that if she ever did run away, she’d be so helpless that she’d have no choice but to come back.

Jold took a deep breath, reminded himself that Meme wasn’t doing this on purpose to make him upset, and sat down again, then tried to phrase what he was thinking as gently as possible.

“You’re free, but being free is complicated,” he said. A thought struck him, a comparison he could use, and he latched onto it. “After…after Lost Niney, I was…very free. I wasn’t an heir anymore, and no one really bothered telling me what I should do, but I didn’t have much of anyone looking out for me, either. So, I was free, but I was also responsible for myself. And now you are, too.”

“Can’t I just be responsible for my room being messy?” Meme asked.

“I’m probably being too hard on you,” he admitted. “It’s okay if there’s a lot of clutter in your room. I don’t really like it, but it’s your room. But you also have rotting food up there, and that can attract bugs and mice.”

Meme made a face.

Jold laughed. “Yeah, that’s how I feel about them, too,” he said. “Also, if they get attracted by your rotten food, they might stay and try to get into the perfectly good food we have in storage, or even mess up your clothes.”

“Okay, that’s a good reason clean up the food, at least,” she said.

“Dusting once in a while probably wouldn’t hurt either,” he said. “If you let too much dust build up in the room—”

“I’ve been in old libraries before, I know what that feels like,” Meme interrupted. “But… Let me keep it cluttered?”

Jold took another deep breath. “It’s your room,” he said. “You can keep it however you want.”

She smiled, delighted.

“But if you ever  _want_ help with organizing…”

“Yes, yes, I know exactly who to ask,” she said. “Is there a reason you’re so fixated on being clean? Is this related to the Key of Abyss somehow?”

“Huh?”

“Y’know, like it just wants there to be as few things as possible around it?”

“You think it’s sentient?” Jold asked. “Wait, is your Key sentient? On one hand, that has serious research implications, but on the other, it’s seriously terrifying—”

“I was joking,” Meme said. “Wow, you’re wound tight today.”

“Ahhh, I just—”

“Seriously, what is it about cleaning?”

“Well, you know that my mother was a commoner,” Jold said. “She was the one who taught me how to do, well, pretty much everything. But when we were at the palace, there were servants, and she said it was polite to let them do their jobs. Except…the servants would gossip about us, and I know they meant for me to hear. They talked about how we were ‘dirty commoners’ or made fun of the books I was reading—”

“So you cleaned so thoroughly that they had nothing left to gossip about,” Meme said.

There was understanding in her expression.

“I know now that they were jealous,” he said. “But I was too little to understand that, back then, and so…”

“So you decided that the easiest way to avoid being hurt was making sure that no one could learn enough about you to hurt you with,” she said. “And you’re still doing it.”

“I… What?”

Meme gave him a look. “Wearing all black whenever you’re not in your school uniform, never smiling in front of people, not even trying to shake off the nickname ‘Grim Reaper’…you’re just letting them run off with preconceived notions about you based on one thing you did.”

“That one thing I did destroyed a city and everyone in it,” Jold said.

“I told you I thought your soul was warm,” she said. “And then you protected me. I like you. You won’t get rid of me that easily.”

“Not even if I try to make you clean?”

“Not even then.” Meme promised. “But you should try showing other people you true self a little more often. I mean, look how things turned out with Mikaray!”

“Mikaray appreciates my efforts to restore Lost Niney,” Jold corrected. “And he’s at least gotten to the point of not hating me personally over it anymore. But that doesn’t mean he  _likes_  me.”

“He brought you a gift, didn’t he?”

Jold raised an eyebrow.

“That cleaning book has nothing to do with restoring Niney,” she explained. “He just saw my room and felt bad for you. He doesn’t do favors like that for just anyone.”

“Maybe not, but we still aren’t friends,” Jold said. “I killed people he cared about. He’s not going to just…forget about that.”

Meme tilted her head to the side. “Could it be that the other reason this place is so tidy is that you don’t think you deserve to have a lot of things?”

Jold threw up his hands, immediately defensive. “It—It’s not like that! I just have a really limited budget, and more important things to spend money on, and—”

“Like equipment to use in your research on Lost Niney?” she interrupted.

He slumped. “Yes, like that.”

“You should value yourself more,” she said.

Jold didn’t really agree, but he didn’t feel like he was going to win this argument.

“I’ll try,” he said aloud, “but even if I stop spending all my extra money on research equipment, I’m not going to spend it on random odds and ends the way you do.”

Meme scowled at him.

“N-not that the way you spend your money is bad, just, buying things isn’t fun for me the way it is for you,” he said quickly. “The first time I had an allowance of my own, I went to a store and bought a bunch of trinkets that I never really ended up playing with, just because they looked neat.”

Meme was nodding. “I guess maybe sometimes I don’t think about what I’m going to do with things before I buy them. But having money that I can take to a store and spend however I want is still pretty exciting for me.” She paused, thoughtful. “I don’t really know what kind of things I like to have, since having things is still new. So I guess I’m testing a lot of different kinds of things out?”

He grinned. “That’s fine, as long as we still have enough left to pay for food and rent. And I’m pretty good with a budget, so that shouldn’t be a problem.” Hesitantly, he added, “but if you ever want to get rid of some of the things you  _don’t_  like…”

Meme groaned. “I promise that you will be the first to know,” she said. “Can we eat now?”

Jold laughed. “I’ll start cooking.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the book is absolutely the one by Marie Kondo. I left her name out because it sounds too much like a modern Japanese name and altered the book cover to fit the setting, but otherwise...
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
